


On Every Page

by jonie90



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Dreams vs. Reality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2015-02-27
Packaged: 2018-03-15 00:26:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3431159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonie90/pseuds/jonie90
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of these stories is true. Eames lives five different lives. Four of them are dreams, not all of them good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. To Just Grow Away

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first post in this fandom, or any fandom, ever. So hi! I have been lurking here for so long, it shouldn't be allowed. 
> 
> This text is divided into five chapters, where four are couldhavebeens and one is the truth. Which one that is I leave to the reader, though some options might be more plausible than others. As such, whether this story contains major character deaths, a happy ending, or neither, is really up to you.  
> Both titles and quotes at the beginning of the chapters are borrowed from The Tallest Man on Earth. All credit to him and his wonderful music.

_" I drop the game of throwing knives alone_

_there must be marks on every tree_

_from the past to our home "_

 

Eames hits the ground running at sixteen and never looks back. Nothing worth looking back at anyway, a mother who died years earlier, a father who drank too much and punched too hard. Two little brothers fighting like dirty dogs in a driveway filled with junk.

New York is everything and nothing like what he was promised, but it swallows him quickly, envelops him in white noise, and he welcomes that, lets it. The city is never saturated with boys like Eames, all of them growing up to be big men with bruises for eyes looking to pick a fight with the world. Petty crime seems at first obvious, and later necessary, when what little money he has runs out. Picking pockets comes natural to him, sleight of hand. He almost makes himself believe that he enjoys it, after a while.

He meets Neil after a few months of living rough, a scrawny rentboy with a wicked grin and deep brown eyes that wink at Eames from across the parking lot, that first time. He changes professions, nothing if not adaptable. Not the worst way to make a living, Eames figures. There are other ways, better ways, but he is very young, and Neil guides him through it, warns him of pitfalls and slowly helps him forge the many different boys that he can be, shows him how he can change almost anything, to please, to tease.

The other boys call him Arthur the artful dodger, the boy Eames knows as Neil. Neil laughs at the name, his dimples deep and mesmerizing in his childish face. Eames can't stop looking, touching, trying to absorb Neil into his skin. When he puts his mind to it, Neil takes care of them. He knows everything about the street, knows all the different players and where to make Eames push if he needs to. In another life, Eames sometimes thinks, he could have been someone to be reckoned with. As it is, he is too broken, pisses it all away with drugs and drink and anything that helps him escape reality.

They get a place together, somewhere horrible and small and so far on the wrong side of town as one can get, and Eames is so in love that his insides are hurting with it. Neil only smiles at him, laughs, sucks him off and then leaves to work, refusing to be captured, to be kept. It is no way to live. It is the only way Eames can imagine.

Neil gets addicted to smack. He has it forced on him by a client the first time, and then buys more for himself. It goes like every sad story ever goes, Eames figures, doesn't know how to keep them from derailing, unable to do anything but play out the part that has been scripted for him. First he begs for Neil to stop, and later he follows, because Eames would follow Neil anywhere. They work more because the money is less, and Eames feels like his entire body is disappearing, sometimes,being sold off piecemeal, but he knows no other way to live, now.

He wakes up in the afternoon in strange motel beds and looks at himself in cracking mirrors and wonders when his eyes changed color. One day Neil comes home with his hands covered in blood, and all he can say is _shit, shit_ , over and over again. Eames cleans him up in the bathroom of their flat, and then they go back to the motel, where Neil shoots up and Eames scrubs the room from floor to ceiling with bleach. _Why is there no body_ , asks Eames, but Neil only shakes his head, muttering to himself. _I don't remember how I got here_ , he says, and Eames shudders.


	2. The Sparrow and the Medicine

_"Only the mayfly used to tell me so_

_now here is august, drop your weight, just let go "_

 

Eames works with Arthur for almost ten years in dreamshare before Arthur develops spinal cancer. At first, Eames laughs about it, at the complete and utter absurdity of having someone like Arthur suffer the _indignity_ of something like _cancer_. He never for a moment considers that the other man could die from it. In a fight between Arthur and anything, really, be it hit men or disease or global terrorism, his money will always be on Arthur. The other man seems puzzled, at first, like he doesn't quite understand how this is happening to him. Later he confesses to Eames that he had imagined something more romantic, like a hail of bullets, or maybe getting to save someone, or anything, really, anything but endless days of bed rest and a slow weakening of limbs. He takes to it with determination though, like he does to everything, like this too is a problem to be solved, if only the right binders can be compiled, the right names connected in neat script on the appropriate page.

The period of deterioration is brutal and short. At first there is an array of doctors and specialists that Saito somehow makes materialize, and after that there are other people, people wearing solemn expressions and making him sign things, sign away things. Arthur loses his hair, with chemo, which Eames imagines he finds greatly distressing, but he is allowed to grow it back, after it becomes clear that radiation it isn't working, that nothing will. The doctors open him up for surgery, takes a look at his tumor, and closes him back up again, shaking their heads. Arthur yells at them when he wakes back up, screams at them that they should have been more aggressive, that they should have fucking killed him, trying, and Eames sits next to him and simply says _Arthur, Arthur, Darling_ , over and over again until the other man collapses back on the bed, body exhausted.

 

Eames continues to sit next to him for new attempts at treatments, he sits next to his bed in the hospital, and finally, when Saito hands over the money required to allow Arthur to receive medical treatment at home, he sits on Arthur's grey sofa, quietly losing his mind. _You should go home_ , Arthur tells him after a while, his eyes becoming too big in his sunken face. Eames doesn't say anything to that, doesn't bother. He thinks about his apartment in the city, a mere half an hour away by car. He thinks how it might as well be on the moon, for all the difference it makes. _But I love this sofa, Darling. It might be a hue of gray so mind-numbingly plain that even I don't have a proper name for it. How could I ever leave?_ He asks after a while, and is rewarded with a sliver of a tired smile.

Their relationship has always been one of quiet professionalism at the core, despite Eames' relentless teasing and Arthur's quips about his lack of dress sense and timing. They have fucked, sure, but only occasionally, when a bad job just turns right, when they are both lonely and horny, when Eames manages to make the other man relax. It has never led to anything more, though, and he blames himself for that now, curses the fact that he's always been too much of a coward, and now Arthur is leaving him, and he could have had years, maybe, if he had been a brave man, but he isn't, and so he didn't.

Eames tells him that he loves him that autumn. Of the million ways he has imagined doing that, over the years, it turns out both better and infinitely worse than he had imagined.  _Well, I love you too_ , Arthur had answered, looking at him with mild surprise on his drawn face. _But you already knew that_. What would hurt the most later was that Eames didn't know whether or not that was true. They share the season before January dawns and the cold takes Arthur away.  

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quote and title from The Tallest Man on Earth


	3. Burden of Tomorrow

_"The tired motion of the rusty bell_

_just humming, visitor I quit, go to hell "_

 

Eames grows up just east of Hackney, with no mother and a father nursing her memory in the bottom of a gin bottle. He flunks out of high school at the age of fifteen in part due to his dyslexia, which his overworked and underpaid teachers simply write off as laziness and stupidity. After leaving school he gets a job at the local garage, something he never wanted but always saw looming in the future, because his dad was a mechanic, wasn't it, and he likes cars well enough, is good with his hands, like, though he had dreamed as a child of creating for himself. 

When he turns nineteen he marries his longtime girlfriend, Lydia, because she tells him she's pregnant. They buy a tiny bedsit together near Clapton Pond, with wall to wall carpet the color of vomit and doors that can be forced, as they discover the first, second and third time they are burgled. She loses the baby three months before term, and Eames learns that you can love someone you never knew, and between the two of them now there is only silence, broken by desperate fights that never go anywhere. She leaves him on his twenty fifth birthday for a chance at a better life, and he understands and lets her go, because it will never happen with him, and they both know that.

For a few years he drinks too much and smokes too many cigarettes, and somehow he ends up owning the garage he works at, and some days the edges that are taken away by drink makes him feel like he's almost content. He turns flabby and lazy and unshaved, and he knows that his youth is spent, even though he's barely thirty three, that this will be all there is, and he's ok with that, most days.

One early Wednesday morning in March a dark-haired man in a pinstriped suit drives into his shop with a beautiful Lotus, and asks Eames to fix it up for him. The work makes him happier than he has been in a long time. The man, who introduces himself as Arthur, shares a smoke with him outside the shop, inhaling and exhaling slowly, and Eames has to will his eyes away from his mouth. Arthur notices, quirks his lips, and shakes his head. _In some other life,_ Mr. Eames, he says, and walks away.

In the morning the car is gone from his garage, a poker chip worth a thousand pounds and a plane ticket left neatly on his desk. The plane ticket is for Mombasa. There is a note on top of it, not signed. _Mustn't be afraid,_ says the neat handwriting.


	4. Revelation Blues

_"I don’t remember where i learned to dive_

_but I am humble for the rocks when I try "_

 

Eames wakes up in a white bed in a white room in a city he doesn’t remember, with white bandages covering his chest and his left arm. It hurts in the removed, impersonal way of major injuries, the kind the doctors refuse to let you deal with by yourself. The steady beep of the heart monitor is the only sound to be heard, and he figures this is a private hospital, figures it's too quiet. He waits, nothing else to do, waits for the other shoe to drop, for someone to tell him where he is and what happened.

It takes a day and a night and then another morning for someone to come see him. Ariadne looks tired and washed out, her dark hair hanging limply around her pale face, the circles under her eyes making them look huge, and her face even younger than normal. _"Eames,"_  she says, and then she cries, for a while.

Eames doesn’t move. Still waiting for something to change. She sits down next to his bed, touches his hand, the bandaged one. He wants to move it out of reach, but finds it hard to even flex the fingers. Whatever happened to it must have been bad. Eames thinks of his body in this way, like separate parts of a whole, connected, but also able to isolated, if a part is being irksome, hurting in a way that might make it difficult to focus.

 _"Eames,"_ Ariadne tries again.

 _What happened?_  Eames asks her, though he isn't sure yet if he actually wants to know.

 _"Where are we?"_ He continues, because although he doesn’t know if he wants to hear about that either, he does need to know, needs to know if he has a safehouse here, if he has any outstanding warrants, what he needs to do first.

 _"In Illinois."_ Smart girl, she answers the easy one first.

It brings something to mind, the place. Rain, heavy and black, making him push up his collar and pull down his hat. Arthur, saying something snarky in his dry tone of voice, making Eames smile.

 _"What happened,"_ He asks again, and there must be something different in his inflection this time around, because she steps back before answering, paling further.

 _"The job, it-"_ She clears her throat loudly before continuing, her voice shaky.

_"They had hired a team of their own, we think. We missed it, somehow, but when we found you, you were both still under, and-"_

_"Where'_ _s Arthur?"_ He asks.

Ariadne shakes her head, sniffles. Eames breathes through his nose, asks again.

 _"He's not-"_ She rakes a shaking hand through her hair, looking out the window. The sky is the color of slate. They are too high up for Eames to see anything else.

Eames lets her take a moment, has another brief memory of hurrying towards a car, pulling Arthur by the hand, the feeling of something beginning.

 _"He died."_ She says, with her little girl voice, small and scared and lost.

Eames looks out the window as well, seeing but not really seeing the dreary October weather. Arthur hates the rain and the cold. Sometimes Eames thinks he moved to Mombasa just to lure Arthur to follow, if not for him then for the sun.

 _"I don't remember how I came to be_ _here."_ He says softly, after a while.

Ariadne looks at him then, and he can see some sort of horrified realization dawning in her eyes. _"Eames-"_ She begins, but he just shakes his head.

 _"I also seem to have misplaced_ _my totem,"_ He says then, still shaking his head.

 _"Eames!_ _"_ She tries again, scared for real, now.

 _"This is real, Eames. I have my totem, this is not a dream."_ He doesn't really listen.

Arthur would never die like that, not without saying goodbye, bleeding out quietly with Eames just sleeping next to him. Again he remembers the feeling of something about to change, a lingering charge in the air, as if a thunderstorm was about to descend and drown them all in sound and fury.

He waits until Ariadne leaves for the night. Then he stops the monitor and pulls out all the wires. He peels the bandage off of his arm and uses a pen left on the nightstand to open his wrists. If Arthur isn't here now, it means Arthur is waiting for him somewhere else, and Eames would follow Arthur anywhere.


	5. There's No Leaving Now

 

_"In that sound of sighing, that empty howl_

_and all the everloving bends in the line of your tries_

_some ends forgotten and some others believed_

_whatever happened to the boy is now a tale for the seas_

_when you know you’re already young_

_like the grass wither to become_

_again and free,_

_it’s all we’ll ever be"_

Somewhere in a dream a group of six long-time friends raise their glasses in toast on a rooftop balcony.The air smells of summer rains, and the night seems to carry a promise of optimism, of the endless opportunity of youth.

 _I dreamt that you died, Pet_ , Eames confesses to Arthur, looking out over the dark city.

Arthur just looks at him, his features shrouded in darkness. Behind them they can hear Mal laughing at something Yosuf said, Dom murmuring something about waking the neighbors.

 _Maybe I did_ , says Arthur, after a long beat of silence.

 _Does it matter?_ And Eames doesn't know the answer to that question, so he lets it go.

The telltale pop of another bottle is heard, and Arthur rolls his eyes, smiles at him and touches his left hand briefly. _Shall we, Mr. Eames?_ He asks, teasing, and Eames takes his hand, brave, finally, and says, _Yes, Darling, I believe we shall_.

 

-Fin-


End file.
